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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 522 07 January 2014 at 8:22pm | IP Logged |
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I sympathize with your frustrations in those classes. I find that for classes to work as well as they're intended, you need an instructor who is a trained teacher with sufficient linguistic background, and also classmates who are roughly at the same level as you are, in addition to your discipline to do homework and/or look up things when you can't grasp what the teacher or assigned learning materials are showing.
About half of the time, my Ukrainian class is like your Croatian class. The teacher isn't a professional, and it shows with his lessons not following a syllabus with a consistent set of material, which ultimately leads to more than enough situations similar to the one above with "pas" one week and "psa" the next without any useful explanation to put things in perspective. The only benefits for me so far are that I've been able to widen somewhat my network of Ukrainian friends, and that I am forced to deal with spoken Ukrainian (actively and passively, as long as one of the other students keeps her mouth shut - It seems that the class is her main social outlet and she always expresses her opinion or tells tall tales under the guise of just speaking Ukrainian. In this day and age, why not sign up for meetup.com or something, instead?) If you're set on learning Croatian, and want to take a class, then it seems that you're stuck with this plodding Croatian course. However, have you looked into attending classes for Serbian (or even Bosnian through someone at a mosque) instead? There are about twice as many Serbs as Croats worldwide, and all else equal, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a class for Serbian when there's already one for Croatian in your city. Maybe a Serbian class would have a better teacher and/or better set of classmates who're as motivated and curious as you seem to be. In fact in some universities, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are taught as one class/course given how they're part of a pluricentric language in the first place. Having separate classes for Croatian, Serbian (and Bosnian) outside the former Yugoslavia seems at least partially motivated by the desires of the respective local diaspora communities who wish to maintain such classes as reminders of their ethnic distinctiveness, pluricentric language be damned. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 10 of 522 08 January 2014 at 12:10am | IP Logged |
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Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head that the teacher needs to be a professional; it isn't always enough just to have someone who is a native speaker.
We have exactly the same problem with lack of syllabus and direction. It's not the end of the world for me because I've got enough books and resources to continue learning on my own, but I feel sorry for some of the other people in the class who are learning a foreign language for the first time, don't necessarily have a lot of confidence in their own abilities and could really do with better support. Unfortunately I have to keep attending to the bitter end (mid-June) because the course is partially subsidised by the government. So the participants pay half the actual cost to the college and the local government makes up the rest. If you drop out, they invoice you for the missed lessons at the full rate. My only consolation is that I will be travelling with work quite a bit over the next few months so legitimately get to miss a few lessons. Sorry, I was being lazy when I referred to it as a 'Croatian' course. Technically it was advertised as 'Serbo-Croatian' and the teacher is from Serbia, but out of seven people in the class, six are interested in Croatian and one in Montenegrin, so we are essentially learning Croatian with occasional indications if a word would be different in Montenegro. If I could find a Serbian course I would definitely attend as I'd really like to get some practice with Cyrillic, but the only classes I've tracked down so far are in London, which is over 100 miles from me. I've found one university in the UK which offers a degree in Serbian/Croatian studies, so if I ever win the lottery I am going to give up work and go back to school. It doesn't hurt to dream :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 11 of 522 08 January 2014 at 12:24am | IP Logged |
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A week into the new year, I think I've done a fairly good job so far of revising what I already know and it's probably time to start doing something more challenging.
This morning I focussed on more Memrise vocab. As I work through my copy of 'Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook' I want to put the course vocab into Memrise so I can practise it. I'm up to lesson 10 so far but I need to go back and add more detail to some of the words, eg. for prepositions, I haven't included what case they should be followed by and that would probably be useful. The course I've started is here if it's useful to anyone else. Where the words differ between each country I've only put the Croatian variant in though because I'm trying not to confuse myself at this stage. Over lunch I listened to Pimsleur lesson 3. I'm hoping lesson 4 will be the one where we get to start ordering drinks, because there hasn't been much variety so far in the first 3. This evening I have shamefully done nothing because I got carried away watching WWE. Tomorrow I am going to give Memrise a rest and focus on rereading the rest of TYC. Edited by Radioclare on 08 January 2014 at 9:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 12 of 522 08 January 2014 at 11:28pm | IP Logged |
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Today I have revised three more chapters of 'Teach Yourself Croatian':
Chapter 9 - My least favourite chapter, because it is about sports ;) The only cheering thing about it was reading through the days of the weeks/months of the year and remembering how despairing I felt the first time I encountered them and how I now know them by heart. Chapter 10 - This was an easy chapter with a bit of vocabulary about weather and the points of the compass. The characters in the dialogue were going on a road-trip towards Varaždin, which was what gave me the idea to go to Varaždin when I was in Croatia before Christmas, so that made me smile. Chapter 11 - This was an introduction to the past tense. There were also some dialogues about purchasing tickets, which were pretty straight forward for me now because I had a lot of practice buying tickets in Croatia over the summer. I had another 100 words to water on Memrise today, but I didn't too any more planting. I have deleted some of the basic courses (where I feel I have fully mastered the vocab or where the vocab was duplicated on other courses) so hopefully I'll have a bit less watering in future. This evening I read an interesting article about Serbo-Croatian on the Deutsche Welle website. Edited by Radioclare on 08 January 2014 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 13 of 522 09 January 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged |
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This morning I revised some more chapters of 'Teach Yourself Croatian':
- Chapter 12, which covers the future tense and indirect speech. - Chapter 13, which deals with dates - something I find difficult in any language. I have deliberately saved chapter 14 for tomorrow, because I know it deals with the conditional and that is one of my weak points. At lunch time I subjected myself to Pimsleur lesson 4. I am now very proficient at repeating the word 'ovdje'. This evening I went back to Memrise and began planting more of my BCS course. I also had a play on the Crovoc website, which is an interesting site for learning Croatian if you speak German. They have a fun multiple choice game for practising Croatian vocabulary and there's also a page which will give you a random verb to practise conjugating. One of the most useful functions is perhaps the search function which will give you the declension of common adjectives. Edited by Radioclare on 09 January 2014 at 10:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 14 of 522 10 January 2014 at 12:52am | IP Logged |
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Jako zanimljiva stranica - hvala lijepa!
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| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 15 of 522 10 January 2014 at 11:36pm | IP Logged |
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I had an early night last night and woke up refreshed to tackle chapter 14 of 'Teach Yourself Croatian' on the train. This is the chapter which
deals with the conditional and the future exact. I think each time I read it I understand it better, but I'm still not completely confident about which type of sentence is which, so I think I need to read the relevant chapters in 'Colloquial Croatian' and Hippocrene 'Beginners's Croatian' at the weekend and practise some exercises. Memrise is still going strong. I have planted all the vocab from lessons 1 - 3 of the BCS textbook now and half of chapter 4. I have found that this week that Memrise is the most productive use of my time when I'm too tired to concentrate on anything more difficult, but still want to do some practising. Some might be surprised to hear that 'Yugoslavia' has been trending on Twitter in the UK all day today. This is because the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries claimed on television last night that Britain could see "a tidal wave of immigrants from Yugoslavia". Oh dear! There is an article about it in the Independent, here Edited by Radioclare on 10 January 2014 at 11:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 16 of 522 11 January 2014 at 11:47pm | IP Logged |
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This afternoon I started reading 'Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language' by
Thomas F. Magner, which was a book I received for Christmas. I had never heard of the book before, so wasn't sure what to expect and approached it with an open mind. The first thing I would say is that the book is a little dated. The copy I have was published in 1991 and - if I understood the preface correctly - is a reworking of a book originally published in the 1950s. If Nadine Dorres has read it, she could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Yugoslavia was alive and well, as the text doesn't make any allusion to what, at the time of its publication, would have been its ongoing collapse. It is an overtly American book, by which I don't just mean that it is written in American English (not a problem) but that it makes some assertions about Europe in general and Yugoslavia in particular which are quite frankly bizarre. I was laughing out loud at some points, which was unfortunate because I'd taken it to a coffee shop to study. My favourite germs from the section on 'Yugoslav Customs and Manners' include: "The average Yugoslav is distinguished by an extended emotional range such that he can swing rapidly from wild excitement and happiness to mood of depression or apathy. It can be an exhausting experience for an American to spend much time with a lively Yugoslav group". "I guess everyone knows that Europeans (not the British!) shake hands a lot more than we do: the Yugoslavs are right in there with them, pumping hands in all directions. In America a man shakes hands only when he is introduced to another man or when he is leaving on a trip. No one is quite sure when an American woman shakes hands; she does it even more rarely and when people least expect it". :D That said, there are so few books available for learning Croatian/Serbian that beggars can't afford to be choosers. This book certainly has some good points, including a very extensive vocabulary list at the back, a comprehensive grammar summary and a nice way of presenting the Cyrillic alphabet. If you ignore the strange generalisations about "Yugoslavs", there is some interesting cultural information thrown in, such as tongue twisters and song texts, which I haven't found in other books. I started to work through the exercises in the early chapters but I confess that I got a bit confused. The grammar is all hidden away at the back of the book and the lessons, which are at the front, tell you which sections of the grammar to read for that lesson. It was a bit cumbersome to have to keep going to the end of the book and searching for the recommended sections, particularly as the recommendations jumped about and didn't follow the order that the grammar had been presented in; you might be told to read something from the end of the grammar chapter, then something from the start, then something from midway through. Often I struggled to find the paragraphs I was supposed to be reading and had to look them up in the index; there were a couple I couldn't find even with the index. I actually think the grammar section is good, but with the benefit of hindsight it would be better to read it from start to finish and have done with it, avoiding all the flicking back and forth. The other thing that confused me was that, having been instructed to read the paragraphs on aspect by a particular lesson, none of the exercises in that lesson facilitated practice of aspect, but dealt predominantly with a much simpler topic: the days of the week. The dialogues and exercises in the first lessons are far far simpler than the grammar sections you are being asked to read. Partway through the book, however, you run out of grammar and the lessons become dialogues and exercises only. I'm assuming that at this point they become more complicated and allow you to practise what you have read, but I had drunk far too much coffee by this stage and had to go home! It was a fun afternoon, but I think tomorrow I'll choose a different textbook ;) Edited by Radioclare on 11 January 2014 at 11:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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